Best Bet to Stall Diabetes Remains Diet With Exercise

By Nicole Ostrow -
Jun 16, 2014

Diet and exercise remain the best
bet for staving off diabetes in patients at risk for the
disease, according to a 15-year follow up on a landmark study
that set lifestyle intervention as an effective approach.

Study participants who lost weight and increased physical
activity had a 27 percent lower rate of developing Type 2
diabetes, compared with 17 percent of those given metformin, a
first-line drug to lower blood sugar. The research was reported
today at the American Diabetes Association meeting in San
Francisco.

More than 29 million people in the U.S. have diabetes,
according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Another 86 million are estimated to have prediabetes, in which
blood sugar is higher than normal, though not enough to be
classified as full-blown diabetes. People with prediabetes are
at risk for the disease without adopting a healthier lifestyle.

“Diabetes is a disease that really develops across
decades,” Judy Fradkin, of the National Institute of Diabetes
and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, said in a press briefing.
“Although rates of diabetes have been increasing dramatically,
outcomes for people with and at risk of diabetes have been
improving dramatically.”

Diabetes, which results when the body doesn’t use insulin
properly or doesn’t make the hormone, is the seventh-leading
cause of death in the U.S. Insulin is a hormone secreted by the
pancreas that helps the body control blood sugar. Type 2, in
which the body doesn’t use insulin properly, accounts for about
95 percent of diabetics.

The findings also showed that patients without diabetes had
a 28 percent lower occurrence of related complications, such as
damage to eye, nerves and kidneys, than those who developed the
disease. That means intervening during the prediabetes phases is
important in reducing early complications, the researchers said.

The researchers were also unable to determine if diet and
exercise or metformin were able to lower heart attacks and
strokes as there weren’t enough events to test the treatments’
effect on cardiovascular disease, they said.

“Hopefully in the next five years or so we may be able to
say something more definitively about the effect of our
interventions on these complications,” Ronald Goldberg, a study
investigator and a professor of medicine at the University of
Miami, said in a telephone interview.